Nearly 40 years after the 7th Earl of Lucan vanished, a new ITV drama turns
the cameras on to those he left behind. But will it provide any answers?

It’s a rainy autumn day and, in the first-floor drawing room of a Belgravia town house, a conclave of well-spoken men are eating trifle, drinking and plotting. A camera crew records their every move. One of their number has disappeared, leaving a bloodied wife and a dead nanny, and the police are on his trail. Outside, the binmen are on strike; rubbish is piling up on the pavements. But neither the long arm of the law nor the downed tools of the working class seem to register in the sphere of privilege and security occupied by these upper-class chaps. “We are obsessed with class in this country and probably rightly so,” says Salford-born actorChristopher Eccleston, “because a great deal of wrong has been done in its name.”

The town house is a key location for Lucan, the new two-part TV dramatisation – from director Adrian Shergold (Mad Dogs, Dirty Filthy Love) and writer Jeff Pope(Philomena, Mrs Biggs) – of one of the great mysteries of the late 20th century. Eccleston is here to play John Aspinall, conservationist, society gambler and close confidant to Lord Lucan.

The house is standing in for Aspinall’s early-Seventies home and the men have gathered to discuss the predicament of their absent friend: John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan (played here by Rory Kinnear). It is November 1974, one day after the murderous assault in Lucan’s marital home, and the aristocrat has vanished. Four decades on, his disappearance still grips the public imagination.

“The Lucan that we meet in the drama is the Lucan who at that time was hugely depressed,” Kinnear tells me later. “He had been estranged from his family, had lost custody of his children, was accruing a great deal of gambling debts, and by all accounts was drinking very, very heavily.” This was the mental and emotional background to the events of that November night: in the basement of 46 Lower Belgrave Street, London SW1, the Lucan children’s nanny Sandra Rivett was battered to death and their mother Veronica was severely beaten. Suspicion immediately fell upon Lord Lucan. The 39-year-old’s Ford Corsair was found abandoned near Newhaven harbour three days later.

“It’s pretty much on public record that shortly after Lord Lucan disappeared, John Aspinall called a meeting,” Eccleston tells me. The owner of Berkeley Square’s Clermont Club, Aspinall gathered key habitués of the gaming establishment, “and what Jeff Pope has projected into that is that Aspinall corralled these men into his way of thinking, and suggested that they say nothing to the police. It was kind of a war council, if you like, where Aspinall extols the virtues of personal loyalty and protection of Lucan. Whether John Aspinall was also protecting himself in some way is a moot question.”

This filming location is only four minutes from Lord Lucan’s actual former home. “We were looking for something of this ilk,” whispers producer Chris Clough as Shergold and Eccleston rehearse the scene. “Because it’s very important for the story that we get the Mayfair feel. And we just hit upon this place.” The house, notes Clough, is for sale.

He thinks it’s on the market for around £12million, a sum at which even the mid-Seventies Clermont Set might have baulked. It’s owned by the Delevingne family; hung on the staircase is a portrait of the lady of the house and her three daughters. Her youngest – supermodel Cara – is instantly recognisable. Clough tells me it’s not the only quirk of this location. “When we met the owner she told us that John Aspinall used to live here. But,” he says, “that was coincidence rather than design.”

Christopher Eccleston as John Aspinall and Rory Kinnear as Lucan (ITV)

Jeff Pope based his script on John Pearson’s 2005 book The Gamblers, a portrait of Aspinall’s social circle. As Kinnear explains, the drama begins with “a small glimpse of Lucan’s younger years… happier times”. John Bingham’s childhood was a mixture of material privilege and emotional privation: his London birth to an Anglo-Irish peer; his wartime evacuation, aged six, first to Wales and then to North America, entailing a five-year separation from his parents; his school days at Eton; the beginnings of a merchant banking career; his taste for gambling, and an early win of £26,000 at chemin de fer in Le Touquet – the same card game that would feature in Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.

That jackpot earned him the nickname “Lucky”, while the connection with the fictional spy went further. Fleming knew Lucan well; in fact, says Clough, the author thought the dashing 6ft 4in aristocrat “would make a good Bond. He’d never acted and he did a screen test. But he was hopeless – until the cameras turned off, then he became quite suave again.”

According to Kinnear, both author and screenwriter portrayed these men as “forming this sort of sect in the gaming-table world, where women weren’t necessarily given a great deal of respect. In some ways it was a fictional isolation that they created so they didn’t have to be reminded of the fragility of their own home lives – and, for Lucan, the breakdown of his marriage over a number of years and the depression and frustration that caused him, and then the battle to secure custody of the children. And in this script he was at all times geed and egged on by Aspinall to, in his words, 'be a man’.”

Pope, who is head of factual drama at ITV, is a master writer of the real-life docudrama. As well as co-writing Stephen Frears’s current box-office hit Philomena (about a woman’s search for the son she gave up in infancy), he also wrote last year’s biopic of Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs’s wife and produced the critically acclaimed dramas Appropriate Adult, about Fred and Rosemary West, and See No Evil, about the Moors murders.

Pope says he first considered dramatising the Lucan mystery “a long time ago – ’cause that’s what I do: I take on these big, iconic stories. But I didn’t feel there was quite a story there. I always felt that whole idea that he’s hiding in some hunting lodge in Namibia was a bit bogus; something that was pulled out a couple of times a year for the newspapers on a quiet Monday. So I just couldn’t find a way in.” Then a colleague gave him a copy of Pearson’s book and it spurred him to take a fresh look at all the other material written about Lucan over the years. “And what really clicked was the context. I suddenly thought what was really interesting was: what on earth made Lucan think that the way to solve his custody battle with his wife was to kill her?

“And what I discovered is the roots really go back to school and college days, and this group of friends that coalesced round the Clermont. My take on that era is that these men were kind of hermetically sealed inside that club.”

His screenplay duly portrays the sociopolitical context of Britain in 1974, the year of two general elections and of the Conservatives losing power to Labour: “the miners’ strike, the power cuts, the pound was plummeting, rubbish on the streets, bodies unburied in graveyards,” says Pope. “Britain was broke. But at the Clermont Club they were inside a bubble, largely constructed by John Aspinall. As long as they kept gambling they had all their other cares and comforts attended to.”

It’s hard to imagine that if the accused man had been plain old John Bingham, the Lucan story would have endured so long in the collective memory. But while Pope suggests that our fascination for the mystery speaks of our undying obsession with the aristocracy, his drama isn’t about class per se – “it’s this rare strain of it that’s centred on the Clermont. You have Aspinall banging on and on about how he and his friends are born out of their time, how they’re born to lead… So it was really that feeling that 'we are above the law’. That is what Aspinall engendered in his friends.”

For Clough, Aspinall, who died in 2000, was a “manipulative, Machiavellian puppet master”, but Eccleston is slower to condemn the man he portrays. “He is an ambiguous character. But I think it’s fair to say that the actual John Aspinall focused on making as much money as he could to feed his passions for the conservation and ownership of wild animals.”

Christopher Eccleston as John Aspinall (ITV)

Adrian Shergold knows better than most Pope’s mastery of such thorny – and often very dark – factual events. Together they have already made Pierrepoint – about Britain’s last hangman – and Danielle Cable: Eyewitness, about the road-rage killing of Stephen Cameron by gangster Kenneth Noye. And he acknowledges the wider television drama vogue for true-crime and real-life adaptations. ITV has recently filmed The Lost Honour, a dramatisation of the witch-hunt of Bristol landlord Chris Jefferies, wrongly accused of the murder of Jo Yeates, while Lucan’s festive season broadcast slot is close to another, if markedly different, ITV biopic – that of Tommy Cooper. (One of Pope’s forthcoming projects, meanwhile, is the life of Cilla Black.)

Yet the director admits to sharing the discomfort that some viewers feel at the “factionalising” of crimes involving actual victims and grieving relatives. “I don’t know necessarily that I’m always interested in those dramas, personally. When Jeff did the Moors murders [drama] and at the time he was talking to me about [directing] that – I personally couldn't get involved. I just felt it was one subject I didn’t really want to explore, even though I think what he did was very successful and a very clever piece of work.”

For his part, Pope insists he always strives to avoid sensationalising the subject or reopening old wounds. He cites the case of Appropriate Adult, which starred Dominic West and Emily Watson and won three Baftas.

“What we didn’t want to do was some kind of ghoulish re-creation of the unspeakable acts that went on in the cellar of Fred West’s house. And I couldn’t see any point in trying to get inside the head Fred and Rose – they were psychopaths, and there’s nothing to be learnt from that.”

But by approaching the horrors of Cromwell Street through the eyes of Janet Leach, the “appropriate adult” who sat with West during his police interviews, “it allowed us to find a fresh perspective, and to understand what had happened. The most remarkable thing about the West murders was that they were hidden in full view, in this suburban street, by this cheery couple.

“And to apply that to Lucan,” Pope concludes, “I thought this was an opportunity to explain something that has not gone away for 40 years. The Lucan mystery has not lost any of its fascination.”

Pope offered to meet any of the affected family – including Lucan’s son George, who was seven at the time of the events. “The main purpose of the meeting was that George had a horror that this would be a piece which perpetuates the idea that Lucan is alive and in hiding somewhere in Africa, and that he and his sisters had secretly met him over the years.”

Pope could reassure him that his drama would not perpetuate that headline-grabbing fancy. But does it “solve” the mystery? Did Lucan do the deed, and is he dead?

“Watch the piece,” Pope says. “The heart of our drama is, what happened to Lucan later? And we do posit answers. I felt passionately that we should: it would have been a cop-out if we didn’t actually suggest an answer.”